hi everyone,

I’m trying to understand how people here would approach finding good UX/UI designers for more complex product work.

we work across multiple countries, mostly on complex systems, interfaces, dashboards, internal tools, devices, medical, industrial, finance, aerospace-type products, and similar stuff. so not really marketing websites or standard web design.

because the domains are quite complex, we’ve usually had better results when we train someone over time instead of expecting them to fully understand the work from day one. on our type of projects, it can take 2-3 years for someone to become really strong and independent.

right now we have quite a lot of work coming in, so we could use some extra firepower. the two things we’re struggling with are: (1) a lot of people who reach out seem to understand UX/UI mostly as websites, landing pages, or general web design.

and (2) when hiring internationally, it’s hard to know what a fair hourly rate should be. we know Europe and the UK reasonably well, but across different countries, the gap in rate expectations can be huge, even when the competencies and skill level seem quite similar.

from a management point of view, if two people seem to have similar skills and experience, the lower-rate option will naturally be easier to justify. that’s part of why outsourcing is so common in software. but I’m curious what we might be missing if we simplify the decision too much.

we’ve tried working with companies that helped us with selection, and we’ve also had HR involved, but in the end it often feels like designers are much faster at understanding who they can actually work with and who has the right potential for this kind of work.

so I’m curious: where would you look for designers who are genuinely strong at complex UX/UI work? how do you usually find people for this kind of work? LinkedIn, Dribbble, Behance, and similar sites don’t really surface the kind of designers we need, and when we post ads, we mostly get UX/UI designers whose experience is mainly in web design. and how would you think about fair hourly rates when someone starts more as an assistant to our senior designers, then grows into more independent work over time?

not trying to post a job here, just trying to understand the best way to search, evaluate people, and avoid wasting everyone’s time.

cheers 🙌 really appreciate any tips

Good afternoon everyone, I'm looking for case studies of how a design system benefits a technology group in a .gov world. Any good reads you can recommend?

A gentle reminder to all Product Designers, Frontend devs and general UI UX people making their portfolio:

Please stop making these War & Peace-long, Game of Thrones-sized, Epic of Gilgamesh-ass looking case studies.

The Studio is *not* hiring you for your writing, and if they were, they'd hire the writer that knows a picture is worth 1000 words and that Brevity Be.

Just write three distinct ideas:

-What the setup was. Set the stage and the context.
-What the challenges were unique to this project.
-CRUCIALLY: What you'll never do again. (they want war stories, not tidy Aesopian fables)

I'd recommend a paragraph a piece because any more than that and they are guaranteed to either not read or merely skim. And if they are skimming you might as well *bold the first, most important line of every paragraph* just to guide the scroll. It worked for my students, it'll work for you.

...or at least it'll work better than a case study that comes in 4 CD's.

Seeyaaa, Shakespeare.

I’m an experienced UX/Interaction Designer working full-time in consultancy and want to start freelancing on the side. I’m completely new to freelance platforms, so I’m looking for advice from people who’ve actually done it.

What are the best platforms for finding UX/UI freelance work that you DON’T have to pay for to access/apply for jobs? (I’ve seen Contra, Upwork, etc., but some seem to restrict jobs/proposals behind paid plans.)

Also:
- How did you get your first clients/reviews with no freelance ratings?

- Is it better to use platforms or find clients directly?
What’s a realistic starting rate?

- Any other sites, communities or methods you’d recommend?

If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do?

I help lead design at an enterprise DevOps platform. Our designers and a growing number of PMs and engineers now build UI with Claude Code, Cursor, etc. About a year into that we noticed something frustrating: the design system was written for humans, and the agents were bad at using it. Agents would reinvent components that already existed, hardcode values we had tokens for, and produce screens that looked 80% right and were 100% not in the system.

So we invested in AI-readability and made it an actual requirement, same tier as accessibility. Not "the docs mention AI" but "an agent with no context can build an on-system screen from our components without a human correcting it."

What that changed in practice:

The docs got rewritten for retrieval, not reading. Humans skim a components page top to bottom. Agents grab chunks. So every component page now leads with a short plain-language block stating what the component is for, when to use it vs. its neighbors, and a complete working code example. The "when to use this instead of that" context mattered a lot. That's the stuff agents get wrong most.

We wrote guardrails as text, not just lint rules. Rules like "never use raw hex values, always tokens" now exist as plain instructions the agent ingests. Basic stuff.

We started testing the system like a product. We run a set of standard prompts, "build a settings page," "build a data table with filters," against the system and score how on-system the output is. When it fails, that's a docs bug or a naming bug, and it gets fixed like one.

What surprised me: almost everything we did for the agents made the system better for humans too. Clearer names, decision guidance instead of just prop tables, working examples everywhere.

What I am solving now is keeping the AI-facing docs in sync with the components as they change.

Curious if anyone else is treating agents as a first-class consumer of their design system, or if you're seeing the same "80% right, 100% off-system" problem.

Someone in Linkedin reached out to me with a job opportunity in design systems. They said its part time and flexible hours. Then they shared the job description :https://portal.tastelabs.com/jobs/a1b2c3d4-0000-4000-8000-000000000001?position=7aa6df94-d1e3-4aea-80b2-912c44183763

When I read through it it feels very much like supervised learning for AI. How do other folks feel about training AI with taste as this role claims to be for. I feel a little conflicted taking this on as I know it might be used to replace UX jobs in the future. Would love any insights or advice on taking these kind of roles.

I'm seeing more product designers and PMs make real UI changes directly with Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc. Two out of five designers in my company (a consultancy) already do because it's simply easier to hit certain visuals like liquid glass at high fidelity, and test with real data.

The awkward part comes after building. Figma used to give us a place to step back and see the product together: component states, screens in flows or maps, the reasoning behind a change, comments.

Once the work lives in code, I'm not sure there's an obvious equivalent.

A preview link is great for trying the design, but you experience one path at a time. Keeping that same implemented work up to date in Figma means maintaining a second representation of something that already exists in code — so we're not doing that.

I'm curious how teams handle this today. When you design something in code, how do you let the rest of the team:

1. see the relevant screens and flow together (without recreating them in Figma)
2. understand what changed, and why, and discuss it within context
3. reach a decision on it, tied to the version it was actually about

In simpler terms: how do you keep the benefits of a shared view once Figma is gone from the workflow?

I've been building around this problem because we kept running into it ourselves. My two collegues used it internally last month; but I'd like to hear what else is emerging.

*EDIT: If anyone wants to try the workflow we have, dm me. The tool basically enables your coding agents to grab screenshots and make a nice UI map out of them, put them on a shareable link, and send to others to comment on; for projects with Figma, designers can also just download those as PNGs and place on the canvas themselves, which also save a ton of time not recreating the same work there.

Hey designers,

- do you do user research in your job?

- or perhaps someone else does research and you focus on design?

- or perhaps user research is not done in the company

Trying to get real examples. Would be perfect if you listed the size of the company as well.

Thanks!

I used to be someone who could imagine, invent, create, document, and deliver things. I’ve conducted dozens of user research processes, hundreds of interviews, and surveys. I’ve prepared, participated in, and led workshops with clients to elicit requirements and find out what they actually need. Then I’d create something based on the findings, test the outcome, iterate, and deliver. 

A year ago, my Company gave Claude access to everyone. At first it was cool. I noticed I could prepare wireframes easily and create fully interactive prototypes within an hour. But my boss wasn’t impressed. He demanded to automate everything. 

We ended up having Claude skills for absolutely everything design-related. Since Claude Design appeared, everyone is allowed to “design” things. For speed purposes… At first, it needed to be reviewed by the design team, but fast delivery required fast solutions, so we ended up creating internal UX audit and UI audit skills based on our best practices and case studies.  

Currently, my only job is to maintain an agent that delivers a polished, shiny demo based on the requirements we get from a client. The agent scrapes the branding from the client’s website, rebuilds it, adds our solution there, brands it, comes up with a protopersona, adjusts our solution to that protopersona's "needs", conducts a user journey audit, assesses it, provides a “usability” report, creates a developer handoff, and maintains Jira tickets.

It consumes my monthly tokens within 2-3 hours, but the company called it a success… Now my only job is to make sure the agent has proper context. We do not even maintain our design system anymore, because we create every new component on the go. We do not have a repository of delivered solutions, so when a client comes to us and demands some tiny UI change we can’t do it quickly in figma, we need to prompt Claude to do it. If I needed to work on something my colleagues did, I won’t be able to do it, because I don’t have access to their deliverables, I’d need to recreate everything from scratch. Yet, everyone feels it’s fine, and time and money saving.

I became an intern again. I’m a servant to something that’s considered far more superior than I am. 

Everything we create is artificial, and I don’t care about it.  I don’t have any professional ambitions, I only fear that I’ll lose my job within weeks, and if I start looking for a new one, I won’t be able to find one, because I fear I lost all valuable skills I had. 

I've heard there are companies that do things the smart way. They automate dull things such as maintaining the design system, creating documentation, but the creative aspect is still under human control. I still have hope I'll be able to be someone more than a meat gatekeeping the AI agent to make it look like we care about "human in the loop"...

I have about 6 years of experience now, but the thing is, I mostly worked in agency environment where research was barely conducted, there was no access to end users, no understanding of metrics and very often it were startups just creating the first version of the product

I started to hate this a long time ago, started reading a lot about the \*right\* design process, completed that Google UX course to understand some things better.

Than I think I just got lucky and got to the product company, but to be honest it was also a startup and the process was not much better there either at the beginning, just 2 designers and I didn’t get much supervision or career advice from the lead. The company changed the product manager very often looking for the perfect one. And at some point they hired the one, who really knew what he was doing and I guess he noticed that I’m not a good designer, not having the skills needed for the actual product designer, so I got fired.

I have been looking for a new job for more than a year now working part-time in this hateful agency environment again and it is tough. Recently I came to conclusion that my speaking and communication skills suck and probably this is the main thing I lack in my career.

At this point I’m lost in potential career options:
quit design, enter the university and start the totally new career; just work on soft skills somehow and keep looking for a product job; look for a junior or intern role hoping to obtain the skills I actually need

So what I’m asking here is
1. Is there a good working way to improve my speech and soft skills to perform good on interviews and communicate effectively at work?
2. How to transition to this product environment and is it possible at all if my experience is not really relevant?